Paul Desmond: Take Eighty-Seven

Referring to the “Going Like 80 (+)” post of November 23, Rifftides reader Ned Corman writes:

And, of course, Paul would have been 87, if I have it right.

Yes, he was born on Thanksgiving, November 25, 1924. It has become a Rifftides tradition to observe the occasion. Lamenting Paul’s absence, one of Desmond’s favorite playing and socializing partners, Jim Hall, once said that he would have been a great old man. That makes sense; he was a great young man. Dave Brubeck said, “Boy, I sure miss Paul Desmond.”I found this photograph among Desmond’s belongings and included it in his biography. Undated, probably from the late 1950s, it shows Paul and Duke Ellington chatting at the railing of a ship. Where they were bound, I have been unable to discover. Remembering both, let’s watch and listen to Desmond as he solos with the classic Brubeck Quartet on Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” This was at the University of Rome in 1959.

Comments

An evening at a jazz-bar. Two men are sitting at a table discussing music and musicians. One is championing the work of a modern young saxophonist in glowing terms:
“His music will be played when Paul Desmond is forgotten”
The other replies nonchalantly:
“Hmmm, and not until!”

What a great comeback! Music like Paul Desmond’s will never be forgotten. I keep hoping that somewhere someone will find some previously unreleased material out there and a new DVD will be available! Happy birthday Paul!

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... Read More…

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Picks

The coincidence of trumpeter Clark Terry and producer Orrin Keepnews passing within a few days of one another brings to mind a timeless album on Keepnews’s Riverside label. Terry’s 1958 In Orbit featured a special sideman. He asked for Thelonious Monk on piano. For a reissue of the album the producer wrote that, to his surprise, “…Monk agreed without hesitation, did not ask for a heavy fee (I believe he was paid no more than twice the union-scale maximum) and turned in the most relaxed, happiest and funkiest Monk performances I have ever witnessed. One reason may have been that Clark made no special fuss over him–and included only one Monk tune on the album.” The result remains an essential item in both Terry’s and Monk’s discographies, and a feather in Keepnews’s cap.

Pullman’s research, detail and zeal override flaws of style in this indispensible study of the architect and spirit of modern jazz piano. The author is illuminating in his treatment of Powell’s early years as a child prodigy. He is chilling in his documentation of the mature pianist’s tribulations in the hands of police, mental institutions, lawyers, the courts, and some of his women companions. He paints a bleaker picture than the conventional wisdom that Powell’s European exile was a happy period. Concocted racial euphemisms like “afram” and “euram” are distractions, as is banishment of “the” in the names of things. Descriptions of Powell’s music making are likely to send the reader to the CD shelves or YouTube to hear the brilliance of the pianist’s inventions. Pullman delivers invaluable information about a great artist. Flaws, eccentricities and all, this is an essential book.

It would be safe to say that the pianist Vijay Iyer is the only jazz musician who constructs his music on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers introduced by the Medieval Italian mathematician. Safe that is, if Iyer didn’t credit saxophonist Steve Coleman with giving him the idea years ago. Maybe Coleman got it from Bartók (e.g., “Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta”). Whether Iyer’s ascendency in jazz can be credited to his mathematical expertise and intellectual romance with numbers is beside the point. What counts is the effectiveness of the music. On some of the pieces here, Iyer, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore avoid the boredom of repetition by overlaying sheer lyricism. In Thelonious Monk’s “Work,” Coltrane’s “Countdown,” Iyer’s own “Wrens” and “Break Stuff,” and his langorous unaccompanied solo on Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” boredom is unlikely.

There is muscle and grit in the sound of Ms. Parrott’s baritone saxophone on Ornette Coleman’s “Round Trip.” Playing alto, she comes closer to essence of Coleman in “Rosa Takes a Stand” and “D. Day.” Her work on both horns is inflected with a kind of Coleman chanciness, but it would be a mistake to categorize this Australian who moved to New York in the 1990s. In a song written with her bassist sister Nikki, “Do You Think That I Do Not Know,” and a moody adaptation of “Waltzing Matilda,” her lyricism can be reminiscent of mainstream saxophonists like Harry Carney and Willie Smith. She turns Brazilian in Pixinguinha’s classic “Um a Zero.” Ms. Parrott has exquisite dialogues with fellow Australians Nadje Noordhuis, trumpet, and Carl Dewhurst, guitar. Drummer Matt Wilson and bassist Chris Lightcap complete a flawless rhythm section

Trios concentrates the essence of understanding that Bley, Sheppard and Swallow have developed over two decades of collaboration. She recorded the album’s five pieces in various configurations on earlier albums, but the spare instrumentation of her piano, Sheppard’s saxophones and Swallow’s bass creates space for leisurely exploration of the deep harmonic possibilities in her compositions. Most of all, though, melody is what dominates these performances—intriguing melodies like those of “Utviklingssang,” “Vashkar” and others written by Bley—but also those invented by Sheppard, a great tenor saxophonist. Swallow long since, in effect, remade the electric bass. He solos with the facility of a guitarist and, as in the first movement of “Les Trois Lagons (d’après Henri Matisse),” can create walking bass lines that make you want to dance. This album has become a habit around here.

The title comes from what Fats Waller said when he saw Art Tatum walk into a club where Waller was playing. Dan Morgenstern tells the story in his notes for this essential collection, “…he stopped the music and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.’” Tatum was Waller’s primary inspiration. The master had no hesitation about paying obeisance to the student. Using a disc recorder, Jerry Newman captured the incredible pianist in Harlem clubs in 1940 and ‘41. The music on this album is not a recent discovery. Don Schlitten released it as an LP on his Onyx label in 1973. The High Note CD has been available since 1998. I’m recommending it now it out of concern that some of you may have deprived yourselves of these indispensible snapshots of Tatum’s genius.